A software multilevel fault injection mechanism: case study evaluating the Virtual Interface Architecture

The characteristics of failures occurring in networked computing systems are still poorly understood. As a consequence, this is a rich area for exploration, especially with the arrival of new network interface standards, such as the Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA) adopted by Microsoft, Intel and Compaq. The goal of VIA is to improve the performance of distributed applications by reducing the latency associated with the exchange of critical message between processes in Windows NT-based systems. In this paper, we propose the SMiFI (Software Multilevel Fault Injection) mechanism to evaluate the failure characteristics of networked systems, specifically VIA. The mechanism covers all software protocol layers of the host interface and corrupts both the messages and the computation engines that manipulate the messages.